Witch-hunter-hunters, Bigots and Fantasists: The Sorry Face of the Modern MSM

If the Moonbat and the gruesome Mrs Bercow both get the pants sued off them then who's going to worry? If the whole paedophile fantasy suddenly deflates like a giant kids' party balloon, making amusing farting sounds as it does so, then so much the better. And if the Labour Party's obnoxious chief fantasist Tom Watson, who may now officially have gone too far, has finally fallen from his pedestal then I shall not shed a single tear.

The turning point, interestingly enough, probably came last Thursday morning, when Phillip Schofield on live TV did his Joseph McCarthy thing and tried to present the PM with a list of known Communists within the Democrat Party suspected paedophiles in the upper echelons of the Tory Party. The PM responded somewhat oddly that he didn't want the whole paedo-hysteria to devolve into an anti-gay witch-hunt.

And who can blame him? The old Private Eye headline 'Top poof denies rumours that he's a closet Tory' ought, in theory, to work for the likes of Lord McAlpine. Except that even back in the 1960s, when even Private Eye was still all "ooh er nasty" and "homophobic" about gay people, actually being gay was still basically OK. It wasn't illegal anymore and hardly anyone thought it should be. But it was still seen as funny (in both senses). Having the hots for tots, on the other hand, is just as illegal now as it's always been, and that's good news for anyone who stills needs a handy scapegoat in a hurry.

And thanks to the weird world of the modern media (not to mention our country's libel laws, which still thankfully have both their bad points and their good points) scapegoats now work even better if they're already dead. When he was alive, Jimmy Savile was little short of a living saint. Now that he's dead, it can safely be said that he was the worst kiddie-fiddler who ever stalked the corridors of power. Call no man happy until he's dead? Certainly! But make damn sure he's dead before you say he's a paedo.

Indeed, it would appear that history really is bunk, if by history we mean the hatchet-jobs that people can only write about a man once he is safely planted. Apparently now only "current affairs" still suffers (or should that be 'suffer'?) from such tedious constraints as "fairness", "balance" and (whisper it) "truth". The old adage that the Truth will set you free then becomes somewhat redundant, provided you can escape from Truth into the comforting world of "history", where what actually happened matters a good deal less than how what you can read and write about it makes you feel.

So what went wrong? All one can assume is that, in the ongoing battle for media control between the Press and the British Establishment, Auntie for various reasons has for now ended up on what the rest of the media will have deemed "the wrong side". So when the Jimmy Savile nonsense blew up all manner of grudges were aired. And so, in response, Newsnight et al panicked, and didn't so much go back to the drawing board as back to old tittle-tattle cuttings books that had been gathering dust since the era of Kincora and Colin Wallace. They certainly did need a scapegoat and fast, and lo and behold they thought they'd found one.

As it turned out, fingering Lord McAlpine (and without actually naming him) was a fairly desperate stunt. The PM on Thursday used the term 'witch-hunt'. He also, of course, played the 'gay' card, which rather turned the tables on the mob. (In fact, whilst looking rather pointedly at Phillip Schofield in his fabulous mauve shirt, I rather thought he used the word 'gay' with a degree of menance I hadn't heard in a long time.) The most extraordinary thing about this particular witch-hunt though (as the ever invaluable Brendan O'Neill reveals here and here) is that the individual behind Newsnight's ludicrous, defensive, "We're not covering up paedos (i.e. not like the Catholic Church)"-report is genuinely obssessed not just with imaginary Welsh political paeodophile rings but also with actual witchcraft.

This particular character, with the appropriately Dickensian name Angus Stickler, hails from an organisation called the Bureau of Investigative Journalists. And if that sounds like a bunch of pitiful hacks pretending that they're Scully and Mulder, there may be a reason for that. Because Mr Stickler is, amongst other things, a keen investigator into human sacrifice, particularly amongst members of Britain's "African community", and no less a dogged pursuivant of African clergymen who supposedly murder children they think are witches. So in other words he's a human-sacrificer-hunter and a witch-hunter-hunter!

And of course

When Stickler, isn’t seeking out political paedophiles in North Wales or African witch-killers in London, he is putting the boot into alleged paedophile rings in the Catholic Church. Indeed, according to a 2003 Guardian report, Stickler was originally recruited to the Today programme in order to “cause trouble for the Roman Catholic Church” (something the BBC loves doing, of course), which he duly did with a series of reports about Catholic paedophilia.

'Nuff said, one would have thought!

As O'Neill sagely notes, this is what has become of supposedly serious journalism. Once the preserve of the dull but credible, now even Auntie and The Grauniad seem to have been taken over by bigots (anti-Catholic ones and otherwise), fantasists, and those who are rather more ready to believe there are paedophiles under our beds - not to mention in high places - than is altogether psychologically healthy.

UPDATE: And lo and behold, an anti-paedophile witch-hunt involving actual, bona fide witches! They're from the West Country, interestingly enough, which like Lancashire was a notorious redoubt for papistical old ways following the Civil War and hence also a magnet for witch-hunters. In Lancashire it was of course typically Catholic families that were targeted for suspicious behaviour, and fingered, especially by children, for all manner of lurid wickednesses. Of course, if  these particular witches on trial at the moment get off (so to speak), after however many Catholic priests in recent times have been both accused and convicted of similarly improbable crimes, we'll know we've come full-circle.